MyGengo Raises $1 Million To "Own" Translation

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Translation service MyGengo has raised one million in seed financing from Point Nine, Mitch Kapor and Wenceslao Casares. Prior to today’s investment, the platform had raised $750k from Dave McClure’s500 Startups. Along with the funding MyGengo is also announcing the hiring of Kenji Yamamoto as Chief Revenue Officer and Jeff Binstock as Chief Operating Officer.

MyGengo is like Mechanical Turk for translation supplementing automated techniques with over 2,500 translators in every time zone. Using a combination of machine and human processes, service has translated over 5 million words in the first three months of 2011, more than the past two years combined.

In the same online translation space as Smartling, One Hour Translation and Speaklike, MyGengo translates thousands of texts daily in 14 languages for clients such as ShapeUp, Evernote, Youversion and Producteev.

What the startup does differently than its competition is offer a low price point (25% below One Hour Translation) and an API and Rails, WordPress and Django plugins for developers.

“MyGengo will *own* translation within the major B2B2C channels that allow merchants and publishers to sell and communicate across borders,” says MyGengo CEO Robert Laing. “This is a huuuuuuge market so we will see a LOT of winners in this space — us AND our competitors! ‘Going Global’ is a huge, defining theme for the Web over the next few years, and about as big a market opportunity as there is.”